


also, fuck the ocean

by orphan_account



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Drowning, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Oneshot, Post-Sburb/Sgrub
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-06
Updated: 2013-06-06
Packaged: 2017-12-14 03:51:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,653
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/832390
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the Game, the kids and trolls end up on a planet very similar to Earth, complete with oceans, mountains, forests, etc. Dave takes Sollux to the beach. </p>
<p>The really bad thing about having the echoes of your powers still working is that you know when things are going to happen, <i>without being able to stop them.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	also, fuck the ocean

**Author's Note:**

> For punkedoutbiifurcatiion on Tumblr, who wanted a Davesol with Sollux the worse for water. 
> 
> (Dave's version of CPR dates from a long-ago first aid course and is probably not at all in line with what is recommended these days.)
> 
> Now illustrated by [lovemegeminiously](http://lovemegeminiously.tumblr.com/post/53677257543/some-scene-from-this-fic-also-fuck-the-ocean-for)!

Wet sand grinds at your knees, rasps beneath your palms. It's in your mouth, gritty sparks between your teeth, sharp grains caught in your clothes. It feels like tiny biting insects between your toes each time you move. You can feel the crystals chew a little further each time you press down. 

It's like pressing down on the dummy, ages ago when Bro made you take those dumb CPR classes. Cool to your touch, rubbery, totally and utterly inanimate. A thing, not a person.

_This is not happening._

_This cannot be happening._

"Let's go to the beach," you'd said. "C'mon. You've never seen Earth beaches. It'll be fun."

Sollux had looked at you over his anaglyph glasses with that oh-really glower that always made you want to poke him in the ribs, and you'd put on your most winning smile and clasped your hands under your chin and fluttered your eyelashes until he cracked up and agreed, giggling, to come explore the littoral zone of this new world. It's even the best kind of day for it, sunny with a brisk breeze off the sea, and there aren't any screaming children or sunburnt holidaymakers cluttering up the place to spoil the view. 

The two of you picked up shells and wandered along the sand at the water's edge, where it was springy-firm underfoot and faded from reflective blue to tawny beige after each wave passed. You showed Sollux how to skip stones across the top of the wavelets as they came in, and he promptly beat you six times running. After that you had to kiss him, of course, and the wonderful strange coolness of his mouth and the things he could do with his twinned tongue-tip did to you what they _always_ do to you. 

(You aren't really sure when this started. Back in the Game it had been somehow easier to fall into and out of love, or at least lust, with the others: you think it was a function of the fact that you were all thisclose to being dead, could be killed by any number of monsters, and so what time you had left was too precious to waste messing around with angst. All you really know is that you are catastrophically retarded for Sollux Captor and his double horns and his improbable typing speed and his fluctuating sense of humor and his ability to do things you'd never even imagined possible with computers. And when you'd all come out of the Game, onto this new version of Earth, you'd stayed stupid for him.)

He'd wandered down into the surf, and squeaked in surprise. "Dave, the sand is moving!" _Thand_. You love the lisp; you love the gnarly dual fangs and snaketongue that render it. 

"Yup, the water's pulling it back. Feels weird under the toes, huh?"

"It tickles," Sollux had said, and then paced further into the water, hugging himself happily. The wind played with the spikes of his hair, blew his T-shirt back, outlining the knobbles and planes of bone just under his skin--he was so thin, _so_ thin, but you made sure he ate. "Tiny landthlideth." 

You'd been watching him fondly, not really paying attention, until you realized he was up to his skinny knees in the water and the waves were pushing at his thighs. "Sol," you called. "C'mon back, there's a rip current here, dude."

"What'th a rip current?"

"Seriously, come on back, that's farther out than you want to be going," and you'd waded in after him. The remains of your powers muttered in the back of your mind that you would not be in time, you would _not be in time_ , and you knew exactly to the second how much time you did not have before the wave came up behind Sollux and knocked him off balance, and how long it took before the unseen current rushing out to sea between two sandbars caught him and pulled him out of your reach. 

He'd yelped when the wave knocked him over, and gotten a mouthful of water, which made him flail and splutter and go down again, and _oh god of course he couldn't swim, he was a landdweller, why the shit would he even have gone anywhere near the sea on his planet_ you could hardly believe how damn fast the rip was running, and threw yourself in after him and swam for dear life. 

Not that you were all that awesome at it yourself; your eyes burned, you were mostly blind and the waves tossed and battered you as you struggled in to catch the rip yourself and let it bear you out to where...you had last seen the dark blob of Sollux's head, briefly, before he went under. 

(You knew, too, how long he'd been underwater.)

When your hand finally closed around his wrist it was limp, drifting with the current, and you were almost sick with terror as you hauled him up to the surface and struck off obliquely away from the fast-running channel. He lolled against you, dead weight, pulling you down, and you tried not to think about it, you tried not to think about it hard enough that you were surprised when the sand scraped at your feet and you realized you had reached the shore, and dragged him up away from the waves, and felt frantically at his neck for a pulse. 

 

You have been pressing his chest with the crossed heels of your palms for...you know exactly how long, the sand feeling like knives--you know it has to be scratching his skin as it is yours. Every five compressions you tilt his chin up, pinch his nostrils shut, and breathe the deepest breath you can manage into him: his narrow chest rises slightly, falls, remains immobile. He is the color of a bad mushroom, pale slick yellow-grey, lips colorless, the yellow beds of his claws don't pale or deepen when you press on them. He rolls under your hands as you work, heavy as clay, limp, vacant. 

_Six minutes, that's how long it took,_ you think helplessly, sitting back on your heels and panting with the effort. _Six fucking minutes and it's all your fault._

Under the terror you're angry, suddenly, because you know it's your fault, and you take him by the shoulders and shake him viciously. His head rolls from side to side. "God _damn_ you, Captor, this is bullshit, this is _such bullshit_..." Something about the way his closed face is turned up to the sky brings the anger to a white-hot point and you're sitting on top of him and you slap his face as hard as you can. A flat _crack_ sound splits the air and your palm stings as if you'd hit solid rock. Hot tears are spilling from your eyes. You slap him again, and then you lean down and cover his slack mouth with yours and push air into him until black spots are drifting in front of your eyes and your chest is aching, and you sob. 

His horns have dug little repeated divots in the wet sand every time you tilted back his head. Looking at those twinned marks is somehow the worst thing, and you are still looking at them a moment later when a horn shifts a little bit. 

You sit up, and notice that there is now a faint yellow bruise on Sollux's chest where you'd been trying to pound his heart back to work; as you watch, it visibly darkens. 

Everything goes cold and clear as ice. You get off him, feeling again for the pulse in his throat, and yeah, it's there, slow and unsure, but _there_ , and you breathe for him over and over and over until there's a thick hitch in his chest. He gurgles; you can see the muscles of his chest and abdomen suddenly twist and set and heave in a terrible liquid cough, and another, and yellow-tinted seawater pours from his mouth. 

You hold Sollux while he chokes and retches and rids himself of what seems like several gallons of water and whatever he'd had for breakfast, or possibly dinner the night before. It's gross as fuck and you do not care in the slightest. When he's finally empty he keeps coughing, and you rub his back. 

"...Dave?" he rasps, eventually. 

"Yeah."

"What...the fuck happened?"

"Accident," you say, and kiss his temple. "You got caught in a rip."

"...Chetht hurtth. Did you...jump up an' down on me?"

"Yup, patented Strider method of resuscitation. C'mon, we gotta get you to the hospital."

"Fuck you," Sollux croaks, and lets his head flop back against your arm. His eyes are half-open, but they find yours. 

"That's no way to talk to the dude who just did the C'mon, Man, Breathe jig all over you, jerkface." You kiss his forehead, his eyebrows, the corner of his eye. Your own heart is doing stupid trembly things and you think you might need to hurl in a little while yourself, and wonder if you can actually drive. 

His hand lifts itself off the sand, wavers, then makes it all the way up to your face. "Thorry," he says.

"That's all right, but you watch it in f-future, Captor." You swallow and force your voice to be steady. "And stay the hell closer to shore."

Sollux nods a little, lying limply against your arm. "I wath right, you know. All along, I wath right."

"About what?"

"Theadwellerth are crazy, they have to be if they actually like that ecthperienthe, and altho fuck the ocean."

"Fuck it good," you agree, and hug him tight enough that he coughs again, and you can't feel too guilty about that because _he's alive_ , he's alive to make gross noises and push feebly at you and grumble and you are, right now, the luckiest person on this whole goddamn planet.


End file.
